The new version of RobotToolKit has a largely unchanged structure from rosbuild version. Differences include stuff such as out-of-source build that comes with catkin. As before, modules need to be linked to the RobotToolKit/module folder for the executables to find them. Executables should be run from RobotToolKit folder e.g.

./bin/robot_simulator --config packages/myPackage/myConfig

cd /path/to/catkin/workspace
cd src
git clone git@github.com:epfl-lasa/robot-toolkit.git
cd ../
source devel/setup.bash  # See note below
rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src
catkin_make

robot toolkit has an intricate circular dependency: to compile RTK you must first source RTK's setup.bash. yikes. The easiest way to do this is to call catkin_make with an empty src directory (this creates devel/setup.bash) and then source the setup.bash file (this sets the path correctly) before attempting to compile the robot_toolkit packages.

There is also a dependency on "ncurses" that you can get by running: sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev

To compile just the barebones robot toolkit (without a simulator or ODE or Bullet), you can pass in blacklist package to catkin_make:

catkin_make -DCATKIN_BLACKLIST_PACKAGES="robot_simulator;robot_gui;simulator_dynamics;rtk_libbullet;rtk_libode"

Alternatively extract the minimal.tgz file; this will place CATKIN_IGNORE files in the correct packages.

There is a new script for creating a rtk package:

rosrun rtk_pkg_tools CreatePackage.py PACKAGE_NAME

This creates a catkin package with minor addition to the CMakeLists.txt file which makes it easy to automatically link modules post build. Now roscd to your new package

roscd PACKAGE_NAME
ls

you will find a CreateRobotModule.py script, which if you run it will create a robot module inside your newly created package.

./CreateRobotModule.py MODULE_NAME

This will create a folder PACKAGE_NAME/MODULE_NAME with boilerplate cpp code for defining a robot module. Note that modules are just libraries that are part of a catkin package.

Next, you need to specify what your package should compile by modifying the CMakeLists.txt. Robot modules should be specified as

add_libarary(MODULE_NAME PATH_TO_SOURCE_FILES),

where PATH_TO_SOURCE_FILES is simply MODULE_NAME/src if you use the file structure given by the CreateRobotModule script. As usual with CMake, you should also specify include_directories and link to libraries etc. Specifically, to get catkin includes and link your module with libraries that catkin provides:

include_directories(${catkin_INCLUDE_DIRS})
target_link_library(MODULE_NAME ${catkin_LIBRARIES})

At the end of the CMakeLists there is a small RobotToolKit specific part which will create symlinks for your modules to the correct place. You just need to list the modules that should be linked and the rest is automatic.

set(rtk_modules MODULE_NAME)

You also have the option to activate a script that will automatically synchronize your package.xml with stuff you add as

find_package(catkin REQUIRED COMPONENTS myDep1 myDep2 ...)

in the CMakeLists. This is useful when developing in cpp and avoids having manually enter dependencies in several places. To activate this function, just uncomment the last line according to the instructions in CMakeLists.txt

If you used rtk_package_tools/scripts/CreatePackage.py to create your package, you will also find empty config and data folders in your new package. These will be linked to to the correct place. If you are convering a package from rosbuild, keep in mind that to comply with the catkin best practices your package shoudl follow this_naming_convention which means that you may need to change the package names at the top of the config file.

In September 2015, during the Great Migration to Github, Felix cleaned up the history of the RobotToolKit repository to remove binary files (and other garbage) that found their way into the repository.

The repository cleaner used was BFG (https://rtyley.github.io/bfg-repo-cleaner/), which preserves history while removing unecessary files.

If for some reason you need to explore the old repository, it is accessible (as an archive) here:

lasasrv2.epfl.ch:/disk1/archive/RobotToolKit.2015.09.15.tgz